


Taste Your Beating Heart

by sunflowerbright



Series: Day by Drabble [57]
Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-19
Updated: 2013-04-19
Packaged: 2017-12-08 22:27:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/766746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunflowerbright/pseuds/sunflowerbright
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She doesn't call them nightmares. They aren't nightmares. They're routine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Taste Your Beating Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Not-So-Bleak Midwinter prompt #29

_And you, little son come safely home_  
 _Riding the tail of the wind._  
 _May you always come this safely home_  
 _In winter, fire and snow._  
\--"Fire, Snow, and Carnevale" by Macdara Woods

 

 

The body of the twelve-year old boy has no head. Or, rather, it has, it is just lying a few miles away, having been viciously kicked after decapitating, as if that simple act would somehow damn her soul completely and she would be free of feeling guilty.

The body is, of course not there anymore. It’s only there when she closes her eyes or when she sleeps, rising from the ground with stiffs limbs, reaching for her and catching despite the obvious lack of eyes or hearing or a head to control the movements.

Johanna knows best of all that you can go on automatic, that you can set your body to do what it needs to, to eat and sleep and pee, even if everything upstairs is shut down or simply withdrawn.

Withdrawn is the only way to deal with dead bodies, lying in a beautiful, flowery meadow. It had started snowing during her Game. Not real snow, of course. Nothing inside the Arena was actually real.

Sometimes she almost convinces herself that that accounts for what she did as well. That the white snow had covered the bodies, and they had disappeared completely. Like sweeping dust under the rug. If you can’t see it, then it’s not there.

Maybe it had been the snow that had frozen her up inside: those long hours, huddling along in blood-soaked clothes, frost on her eyelashes and hands shaking in the cold, maybe her heart had simply frozen over and she had stopped feeling altogether. Maybe that is the explanation for the way she keeps cutting off that boys head, every night in her dreams.

She doesn’t call them nightmares, because they aren’t anymore. She doesn’t wake up with a scream lodged in her throat, drenched in sweat, her heart pounding. It’s become a routine, and the only excuse she has is that she’s cold. From the inside and out.

Of course, when you leave the Arena, you leave the bodies behind, but they don’t leave you. And suddenly there’s a fire there, bright and blazing and tearing down everything Johanna ever thought was established, everything she hated and loved at the same time, because the Capitol was so cruel and fucked up that no-one noticed how cruel and fucked up she was.

Katniss Everdeen topples everything over, and at night Johanna can hear the steady drip as the ice inside her melts, icy drops seeping away one by one.


End file.
